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Hyperloop One to shut down

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Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#261

Post by whywhywhywhy »

louthy wrote: post #247
heads wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not arguing with you here but it would be interesting to know what about tunnelling is fundamentally expensive. Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway…

London's Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) is probably a better example of the cost of a modern tunnelling project (at scale) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

Keep in mind it also has to navigate its way around what’s under London which is a lot more complex than most places, considering it’s full of tunnels, Victorian sewers and mass burial pits.

Less issues if there’s little down there to begin with. Although personally I don’t see why America can’t just build a train like a normal country.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#262

Post by acdha »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #243
acdha wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we have generations of people trained to think that walking further than a hundred feet is an extreme workout to be avoided and that transit systems are full of criminals. It seems like that culture is headed for a cliff, however, as the cost of cars continues to increase (the average sale last year was a year’s median pay!), budgets for road infrastructure become tighter, and climate change becomes harder t…

The people of Singapore pay a minimum of 100K for the privilege of owning a bottom tier car and the demand for cars there is overwhelming and insatiable, despite the world class and extremely clean mass transit systems. The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.

> The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint.

If you have them when other people don't, yes. The problem is that by the time this is no longer true, you likely have a large sunk cost fallacy and political leaders firmly committed to the model and will struggle to realize that all of the time in traffic, countless deaths, and lowered quality of life for everyone around are in fact not actually inevitable.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#263

Post by AniseAbyss »

dangus wrote: post #223
standardUser wrote: post #195

I think we should accept that, at least in the case of the US, most future transit infrastructure will be built on existing roads. Every other options is an order of magnitude more expensive. Plus, we have so many roads! If we didn't use them it the most inefficient way possible - cramming them full of giants cars for single people who also happen to be terrible pilots - we could get a ton of bandwidth out of them. A…

Incorrect. The US is made up of a huge swath of towns and cities that wouldn’t even exist without railways. https://vividmaps.com/railroads-in-america/ You say that every other method of travel is more expensive…but that doesn’t really pass the sniff test, does it? The Big Dig in Boston adjusted for inflation cost more than New York City’s “world’s most expensive stretch of subway.” The California high speed rail pro…

[dead]

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#264

Post by bluGill »

kiba wrote: post #91
ghaff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic issues are mostly intra-city--not inter-city. I'm not sure anyone is really arguing against commuter rail (however bad it is in many cities). But about inter-city rail in many locations.

Traffic issue is clogging up my suburban neighborhood during rush hour. So I think of it as distinction without a difference.

That is almost all traffic from your city

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#265

Post by ljm »

dougmwne wrote: post #201
standardUser wrote: post #195

I think we should accept that, at least in the case of the US, most future transit infrastructure will be built on existing roads. Every other options is an order of magnitude more expensive. Plus, we have so many roads! If we didn't use them it the most inefficient way possible - cramming them full of giants cars for single people who also happen to be terrible pilots - we could get a ton of bandwidth out of them. A…

I’ve slowly lost my innocence when it comes to public transportation in the US. At this point I can see that 95% of the country is absolutely locked into low-density single occupancy transportation at least till we invent sky cars. We have trillions in sunk cost that covers nearly every road, every home and every business in America. We will never, ever be Europe.

I was in Miami some time ago, around Wynwood. Never really saw anyone walking around, and if we wanted to go anywhere then it basically required ordering an Uber.

The difficult part was getting a sense of direction because there aren't really any obvious landmarks to look out for when wandering through wide-scale suburban sprawl. It's like the availability of GPS has just allowed this kind of sprawl to become even more labyrinthine because nobody needs to bother with street names or directions any more.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#266

Post by diebeforei485 »

mynameisnoone wrote: post #189
qingcharles wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Channel Tunnel was attempted in the 1800s and failed. A hundred years later they tried again and succeeded. So...

Apples and oranges false equivocation of vastly different engineering problems. The problem with vacuum trains is they aren't workable with current materials, are impractical, and are too damn expensive. https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk

I didn't watch the entire 28 minute video, but I did watch the first part and the creator has a misconception that you share. It's key to understand that the Hyperloop concept uses low pressure (around 100 Pa), not a vacuum.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#267

Post by [deleted] »

standardUser wrote: post #195

I think we should accept that, at least in the case of the US, most future transit infrastructure will be built on existing roads. Every other options is an order of magnitude more expensive. Plus, we have so many roads! If we didn't use them it the most inefficient way possible - cramming them full of giants cars for single people who also happen to be terrible pilots - we could get a ton of bandwidth out of them. A…

[deleted]

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#268

Post by giraffe_lady »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #256

The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps. How does the thing move in low speed until it's fast enough to have aerodynamic lift? Does it use wheels? I don't think the paper talked about it. You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute be…

What mars colony. We're not even within striking distance of a manned trip. Whatever we do after that is so far out I don't think anyone can responsibly assert what it will require.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#269

Post by noobermin »

Just a reminder, Musk came up with the hyperloop as a gimmick as an alternative to rail, and he had no plans to seriously work on it. Just another idea from the idea man (if it isn't clear, this is meant to be derogatory).

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#270

Post by 1920musicman »

4death4 wrote: post #249
1920musicman wrote: post #246

A bit off-topic, but still in the general domain of the future of transportation... Is anyone building autonomous medium size containers today (about van-sized)? Basically a container without a cabin, fairly slow moving, very conservative in terms of traffic, that can drive at night within city limits and drop off reusable smaller containers with packages for entire apartment complexes? This seems to me like a reason…

Convenience always wins. Reusable containers are not more convenient than disposable paper, therefore it's unlikely to be successful. That and "slow moving, very conservative in terms of traffic" sound like a miserable thing to unleash on the streets, even at night.

Oh, I don't mean reusable containers for individual items, sorry if it wasn't clear. This autonomous vehicle would drop off smaller (than itself) locked reusable metal containers, with all small packages inside.

Instead of this vehicle having to deal with unloading dozens of small packages at each destination. Just a way to optimize delivery further.

> sound like a miserable thing to unleash on the streets, even at night

It's about finding the right balance. At night streets are mostly empty (e.g. 2-5am). What we have now is not optimized at all - hundreds of Amazon trucks moving through the city during the day.

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